


In Every Person, A Universe

by TrufflesTheMushroom



Series: In the Midst of the Blackest Storm [2]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: "Everybody" Lives, Developing Friendship, Lots of Water, Multi, Multilingual Character, Statistically it Makes Sense for One of Them to be Gay, Survival, Who's On First, lots of blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-23
Updated: 2013-08-28
Packaged: 2017-12-24 09:30:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/938344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrufflesTheMushroom/pseuds/TrufflesTheMushroom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Weis and the Kaidanovskys remain afloat in their half-destroyed ejection pods for eight hours, slowly bleeding out and desperate for help. Poor jokes are made, better friendships are forged, and something deep inside Cheung Wei dies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Birth

January 8th, 2025  
10:47 PM

In the fashion of cruel irony, Cheung's life pod surfaces first.

Forcing the first crisp gasps of waterlogged air into his aching lungs, he wrenches himself to a sitting position to scan wildly over the tremulous sea, desperate for a glimpse at his brothers. 「Hu! Jin!」 he screams, not daring to blink even as the rain trickles over his face, holding on tight to the rim of his pod to keep himself from spilling into the waves that threaten to come up and swallow him whole. The only thing he can see clearly in the darkness is the twinkling glow of Hong Kong's shoreline, impossibly far away, far enough away to be little more than a needle-thin neon bar in the gaping, unending black, and Cheung's heart sinks into his chest.

A crazy, completely illogical part of his mind whispers to him, _「This is all your doing. You were born first, and so you bear the weight of your brothers on your shoulders. You are now reborn first, and you suffer the waiting alone.」_

The darkness surrounds him, inescapable as the rain and the furious waves, and Cheung knows that he has drifted too far from the wreckage of the battle, too far from the shore, and possibly, he thinks, every atom of his being trembling, possibly too far from his brothers.

「Hu! Jin!」

Silence, Cheung thinks, might be more merciful than the clamor around him- the thunderous roar of the Kaiju, too far away now to break him but still echoing through the bay as a sharp, solid reminder that he has lost, the howling of the rain and the deep, deep groans of the ocean beneath him. In silence, he might have the comfort of knowing that his brothers can even hear him, and that if they return his cries, he might be able to hear them back.

He screams until his throat is hoarse, almost falling from his pod and struggling with all of his strength to remain afloat. Every muscle in his body twitches and strains and cries out- severed, and empty, and deeply, deeply afraid.

And then-

「Cheung!」

He nearly falls over in sharp relief at Hu's sudden shout. Cheung braces his leg against one side of his pod, balancing his weight to lean into the sound of his brother's voice without tipping over, searching even in the darkness. 「Are you all right?」

「Where's Jin?」 Hu screams back, and Cheung hears his voice start to rise in panic from a shorter distance than he could have dared hope for. 「What's going on?」

「I haven't seen him,」 says Cheung, willing himself to sound calm even as he hangs desperately to the side of his pod. The sounds of battle are frighteningly far away, but he doesn't turn his head to survey the source of the waves that push him further and further from Crimson Typhoon's final resting place. 「Where are you? We have to stay together until the waves stop. We're drifting too far away from the shore.」

Hu's voice grows further and further away, ragged and deadened around the edges by the unending rain. 「Fuck the shore. We need to find Jin.」

The voice in Cheung's head whispers into his ear, _「See? See how the second brother came up after you? See what you have done? You may have failed them- you may have failed Jin. He trusted you. And you might have failed to protect him. He might have screamed for his brothers under the water. He might have drowned, still believing that you might come-」_

「Cheung,」 Hu screams into the air, 「Cheung, my pod bumped into his right after ejecting. His might have torn.」

「Where is it?」

「I don't know, I can't see-」

「Help!」

The cry is a sweeter sound than anything Cheung has ever heard before. It's faint, and very far away, on the opposite side of where Cheung heard Hu. It is nearly drowned out by the clamor around them, the groaning of sinking, twisted metal and Kaiju screeching, but Cheung would know that voice in the afterlife, or in any other life.

Cheung doesn't stop to think. He only takes the deepest breath that he can manage, a lungful of waterlogged air that stinks of salt, oil and blood, and plunges himself into the water, aiming straight for Jin's voice. Instantly he feels the depth of his own mistake- the Jaeger Suit weighs him down tremendously, the metal straining against his unnatural movements (after all, Typhoon was built for fighting, not swimming) as he kicks furiously towards his brother. Every time Cheung surfaces for air, the rain pelting down on the back of his head like a furious reminder that this is all his fault- this is his mistake- this is his doing- like a million whacks with a bamboo switch, he listens for Jin's wild splashing and panicked cries, pushing himself further and further through the rolling waves. More than once the water beats him away, pulls him under for a brief, heart-pounding moment before violently ejecting him upwards again, but then Cheung finally closes his hand around Jin's arm, and the water suddenly doesn't seem so much like a monster.

Jin coughs as Cheung brings him up to the surface, half-sobbing, twisting in his grip, 「My pod- it- it bumped into Hu's. Mine filled up with water and- I thought I was going to- Where is he?」

「He's safe.」

Jin's arm instantly goes limp with relief in his grasp.

The swim back seems much quicker than the swim away. Jin comes back to life as they find Cheung's pod again, and he viciously pulls himself into it before grasping Cheung's arms, holding him half-in and half-out, hanging over the side like a fishing net. He lets out a wild roar. 「What the fuck was that?」

「Crimson Typhoon is gone,」 says Cheung simply, breathing hard into the crook of his arm. 「And I guess we're out of a job now.」 The ocean swallows up any nearly inaudible chuckles from his brothers, and Cheung yells into the darkness, 「Hu, can you swim towards us?」

There is a pause, and then Hu answers, voice full of humor, 「No.」

「Fine. Then I'll push my pod to you. Hold on to the other side, Jin.」

Cheung edges himself across the rim of the open top until he's at one end. He begins to kick, feeling his muscles burn against the metal of his Jaeger suit and fighting the urge to bite straight through his lower lip, and parts the unending waves that tosses the pod violently from side to side. It takes a frighteningly long time to reach Hu, but then the two pods bump into each other, and Jin lets out a childish squeak and a cry that betrays his immense relief.

Still halfway submerged in the water, Cheung reaches out a hand, still encased in his metal gauntlet, and Hu takes it, knowing exactly where it is even in the horrible darkness.

It's only when Hu brushes against him, close enough to feel the shivering heat radiating through the gap at the back of his neck, that Cheung smells the blood through the thick sea air.

Before he can say anything, Jin nearly screams, tremulously and rather high-pitched, 「You're hurt. Where?」

Hu's voice is almost too casual. 「Shoulder. Forearm. Ribs. Hip. Thigh, knee, calf… actually, my whole leg. And also my ear. So just imagine that my entire right side is flayed open under the plates. The stinking cow nearly killed me.」

Cheung's heart nearly stops. Jin tries to scramble towards Hu from where he has been sitting, the sounds of his armor squeaking against the metal of Cheung's life pod shrill against the ocean's pounding, and he only stops when Hu laughs weakly in the back of his throat, 「Stop it, you're ruining the paint job.」 On any other occasion the brothers would share a laugh, but the sound of Hu hitting the water makes Cheung's blood run cold.

Even as he furiously grasps Hu by the armpits, struggling against the pulsating water, the voice inside of him, sly and raspy and constricting his chest, hisses in his ear, _「This is your doing.」_

Cheung climbs bodily into his pod, slowly, painstakingly pulling Hu up after him, careful to never let his right side scrape up against the rim. Jin hauls Hu the rest of the way up, muttering curses hysterically, and Cheung forcibly rips the gauntlets off of his hands, not caring of the rivets tear, if he is left with a little scratch where a rough edge scrapes the side of his arm. He wills his hands not to shake with every fiber of his being, and gently but firmly grasps Hu's head. Initially he feels a pool of stickiness at his neck and he nearly screams in uncontrollable panic, but the blood is only from a wedge-shaped gap in the cartilage of Hu's right ear, dripping down the side of his skull and into his armor. Everything on Hu's right side has been scraped against the interior of Crimson Typhoon's Conn-Pod, tearing into the bodysuit beneath and leaving several shallow but violent and jagged rips in his skin.

The panicked, cursory once-over yields almost comforting results. Even in the rain, buffeted by the ocean and half-sick with adrenaline, Cheung can tell that most of the cuts are not lethal. When Cheung reaches his leg, however, Hu recoils from his touch and suddenly shouts, 「Ouch, son of a pig,」 and for a brief, sick moment, a flare of fear shoots up Cheung's chest. He feels around the plates of armor, torn and slippery with blood and seawater, but he stops when he peels back a bent piece as far as it will go and finds a jagged, angry slash that runs from the top, almost at the junction of hip and thigh, and travels all the way across and down, almost to his knee.

「Fuck,」 Jin breathes, hunching over Hu as if to try and shield him from the rain.

This close, Cheung can barely make out the outline of Hu's face, but he doesn't need to see it to know that Hu is squeezing his eyes shut through the pain. 「A few little cuts,」 he hisses between his teeth. 「Nothing we couldn't handle, even when we were kids. It's nothing.」

「It's not nothing if you nearly drowned, you ass,」 Cheung snarls.

The brothers pay no attention to the far-off booms, momentarily uncaring as the sea begins to tremble beneath them once more, violent waves pushing them further and further away from the cacophony of light and sound closer to the shoreline. A roar, unintelligible pounding. It is all so very unimportant.

None of it matters when Hu is slowly but surely bleeding out inside his Jaeger suit, and the triplets are unbelievably far from help.


	2. Marriage

11:38 PM

「Ah! Shitting SHIT,」 screams Hu, his left hand bucking upwards and nearly hitting Cheung in the face. 「Don't press so hard. You'll kill me, and then I'll have to explain to Mother in the afterlife how her eldest son committed fratricide.」

「Shut up, you whining bastard. You sound like Jin.」

The younger Wei brothers, indignant and defensive for two completely different reasons, give a simultaneous, 「Hey!」

Cheung ignores them and continues to rip through the stiff, plasticky padding lining inside of the pod, tearing it into strips with his teeth and binding Hu's gashes as tightly as he can. It's an almost impossible task, with the last of the trembling from closer towards the shore still sending enormous ripples through the sea, thrashing the Wei's pod against the waves. and the rain still coming down in unending torrents that threaten to drown the brothers in their makeshift, dented and now fraying lifeboat.

Just as Cheung is done wrapping Hu's leg, tucking the end of the bandage into itself with pruny, blood-slick fingers, a huge wave comes at them from nowhere and threatens to topple the entire pod upside-down, and Cheung's reflexes hit almost immediately. He wraps one arm around Hu's head and uses the other to keep him from slamming into the side of the pod, fighting against his brother's recoil, bending halfway over to keep a spray of foamy, ice-cold seawater from splashing Hu's face. He feels rather than sees Jin counterbalance their weight by throwing himself bodily into the other side of their pod, and the Weis emerge from their mini-tsunami incredibly wet but still right-side up.

「What's happening? Is Striker Eureka back online?」 Hu yelps, coughing up seawater and struggling to get up when they stop spinning wildly into the water.

Cheung has to wrestle him back down, holding him in place with an elbow to mutter dully, 「It's Gipsy Danger. Mori and the yellow-haired one are probably in it. Don't worry about it. And don't move. You're leaking into the pod and you're going to draw in sharks with the smell.」

「But- but the water's not so crazy as before. They're- oh no. They're inland.」

「Yes.」 No lies between them.

Jin pipes up, whistling low and sighing almost begrudgingly, 「They're fucking up Kowloon but it looks like they might be winning. Or, at least, taking it down with them. Can't tell from here. Can't even see Cherno or Striker. Mostly I just see a lot of little flashes of light every now and then… But I'm assuming that's from the buildings being broken.」

There is a silence between them, and Cheung says slowly, not even bothering to try and sound casual anymore, 「I'm sure everyone we know is safe.」

「Li-Na is smart,」 says Jin desperately, almost to himself.

「She's very smart. And Zhang-Jie and Liu and Madame Tsai and everyone else are probably fine too,」replies Cheung, keeping one hand firmly on Hu's forehead. 「They must have gotten to the shelters on time. Right now, we have to worry about ourselves.」

Jin nods. 「Maybe they'll send the helicopters down now.」 He shields his eyes from the rain and leans out, craning his head towards Hong Kong Island.

And then, in the dim backlight, Cheung notices that Jin's only been using his left arm- to haul himself into the pod, to grasp at the edge to keep himself from falling, to balance over Hu.

「Jin, what happened to your right hand?」

Even in the darkness, Cheung knows that Jin is pursing his mouth, looking away in embarrassment. 「I think I broke my wrist. Maybe the forearm. The bone that turns into your elbow. Which one is that, again?」

「… And what else?」 Cheung asks, voice colder than he means it to be, as Hu hisses in sympathetic (and real) pain.

「… I also kind of bumped my head a little?」

「Concussion?」

「Don't think so. Hurts like the devil but I feel fine.」

Cheung's chest burns in anger, and shame, and guilt, and dark, dark hatred. 「Even so, try not to lose consciousness.」

「I won't. Don't worry about me.」

A flare of white-hot anger, unbidden and wholly inappropriate, floods into Cheung's chest at those words. _「How can you not worry?」_ the sick voice inside him hisses, coiling through his veins. _「Isn't it your responsibility to worry? You never asked for this. You never asked to be the eldest, but here you are, a disgusting example of the worst older brother in the world. You dragged them into this. You were first and now you suffer the consequences of your mistakes. You're the only unhurt brother. It should have been you. It should have been you. You should have shouldered the burden-」_

Jin's voice snaps him out of it.

「Cheung?」

「… Yeah?」

「It's dark.」

「I know.」

「It's also cold.」

「And you're hungry too, right?」

「And I'm hu- Oh. Yeah.」 This time, at least, Jin's voice is sheepish instead of miserable.

Hu says dryly from Cheung's lap, 「If I bleed out, don't eat my corpse, you two. Give me a nice sea burial and die of starvation with dignity.」

「You're already tainted with seawater and perversion, even if you're already cut up into portions, brother,」 retorts Jin quietly, laughing a little in the back of his throat. 「We wouldn't shame China by eating something so unfit for consumption.」

「Stop being disgusting, you two,」 Cheung grits out. 「Jin, we'll have proper food once the Shatterdome sends out helicopters. Hu, if you make a joke like that again I'll rip off your other ear.」

「Oh no,」 Hu sighs, sounding more worried than he has all night. 「Is the whole thing gone?」

「No,」 The third Dragon assures the second, gently turning his head to poke around at the sticky-slimy mess of blood. 「You just have a little piece missing from the top part. Like a triangle bit about as big as the tip of a finger. Probably got sliced off by debris. You'll never be able to get one of those long bar piercings now.」

Something twists in Cheung's chest. Hu can't feel the extent of his damage. He can't quell the hissing inside of him that burns deep, deep into his core, _「It might be shock. He was on the right side of the Conn-Pod. You let him choose that spot. He was hurt because of you. This is your doing.」_

The brothers keep floating, silently, frayed around the edges and holding on to each other, and sometimes, in their passing moments, whenever their companionship quells their fear long enough to think with a clear head, hoping.

Jin breaks the silence. 「Do you really think there are sharks, Cheung?」 When the elder Weis groan, he adds quickly, 「I was only asking because maybe we can eat those instead.」

Another long, uneventful silence passes. The rain lets up just a bit, but it's no less cold than before, as the adrenaline of the fight wears down to just a rhythm of gently twitching muscles and jittery fingertips. No helicopters come. The only things above their heads are angry, hornet-sting raindrops and pitch-black clouds, blocking even the starlight from their view.

In the pitch-dark, Hu quietly asks, 「Do you think they'll come for us soon?」

Cheung thinks of how thoroughly Crimson Typhoon was destroyed, how the brothers just barely managed to deploy the pods manually, how the panels sizzled with waterlogged circuits and ripped wiring.

「… Maybe.」

It's not a lie, but Cheung has always been the cautious one, and he makes a decision.

「Jin, come here. I'm going to get up.」 Cheung gently transfer's Hu's head to Jin's lap, making sure that he doesn't jostle his leg against the padding, and slowly begins to remove the plates of armor still clinging on to his mostly undamaged bodysuit, thankful for his callouses. When he runs out of emergency latches to unhook, he pries a coin-sized scrap from Hu's completely destroyed back plating to undo the rest of the screws. The pieces on his limbs fall to his feet. Finally, he turns around and grunts, 「Undo the safety catch between my shoulder blades, and make sure the spine doesn't fall on Hu.」

「You're going to catch a cold,」 Jin replies almost cheerfully, but reaches out to fumble with the turning catch with his good arm anyway. 「So what's the plan?」

Cheung doesn't answer, but removes the last of the plating and dives headfirst back into the (still frigid and tumulus) water in only the bodysuit, and emerges at one of the small ends of the pod, willing his teeth not to chatter. 「We take turns pushing the pod closer to the shore. If LOCCENT did get the ejection alert, they'll find us easier if we're close. If they didn't, it'll be a waste of time to try and aim for the wreckage, or towards Striker Eureka. They won't notice us in all of the debris and we'll have lost precious time away from the only sure help- the pier.」

For a moment, his brothers are silent, and then Jin says suddenly, 「Cheung, Tai Tam and Chek Chue are, like, at least thirty kilometers away.」

「We're not headed for Hong Kong Island. We're aiming for Pok Liu. It's vaguely closer.」 With that, Cheung begins to kick, hands firmly grasping the open top of the pod and propelling it slowly forward.

「Vaguely? Ah. Alright, then. I hope I don't lose anything important,」 says Hu lightly, but through gritted teeth. 「I need this leg to play basketball.」

「When we get back you're going to have a lot of really badass scars to show off to Zhang-Jie. Hey, Hu, do you think he'll like you even if you don't have a robot anymore?」says Jin with a quiet laugh.

Hu shoots back in an alarmingly affable manner, 「Do you think any of your girlfriends will like you if you don't have a robot anymore, little brother?」

「Of course they will,」 says Jin with a snort, though Cheung can tell that he is forcing his humor. They all can. 「They like me for my good looks.」

The second and third Dragons begin to squabble affectionately, but the first lapses into silence, as he is prone to.

Cheung has seen every girl, in person and in Jin's head- rosy, glossy-haired and too smart for Jin, but sticking around him anyway because he makes them laugh. Since puberty hit the three of them like cannon fire, Jin has always had no less than two girlfriends at a time. Cheung knows that Jin is currently seeing four, one back home in Shanghai, one in Beijing, an American girl on the West Coast, and Li-Na, in Hong Kong. Li-Na is twenty-three, a street artist, and Cheung has felt, in the Drift, how she makes Jin light up from deep inside whenever she punches him. She doesn't treat him like a celebrity, and freely teases him, pinching his hard biceps with bright green acrylic talons. Once, she stuck a piece of dried squid up Jin's nose, as far as it would go. She's Cheung's favorite.

Jin loves them all, with that raucous, dazzling, and easily distracted love of his. Hu and Cheung often take turns slinging every name they know to their baby brother whenever he regroups with them, all loopy smiles and lipstick smudges under his collar- lecherous two-timer, attention-seeking horned devil, wannabe pimp- but Cheung knows that Jin, for all of his bluster, is only a child, and in the end it all means significantly less than it seems. Jin's girls come and go, and it never hurts him.

Hu is no different. Cheung has only known Zhang-Jie, a twenty-eight year old bartender and writer, in Hu's memories, but deep in the Drift, it's the same as having met him, having kissed him over the countertop, felt his stubble brush against his jaw as the other two Wei triplets hang around the other end of the bar, giving them space. Hu has always been the expressive, passionate one.

But deep in the Drift, Hu's short but relatively normal string of boyfriends melts away in his mind, leaving only the memories of street fighting under a muddy gutter- of sweet, chilled melons in the summer- of patching up Jin's busted knuckles- of slapping Liu on the back, laughing- of his glowing pride when they buy their first brand-new basketball- of comfort, and pain, and pride.

The Dragons know everything about each other, and move as one. That's the perfect irony of the Drift, Cheung thinks to himself as he kicks furiously. It creates, and cements, a relationship stronger than anything another human being could provide. In the end, though it brings people closer together, it creates a bond that naturally repels others, creates distinctions between Us and Them. None of their relationships ever last.

Cheung has only had two girlfriends before, one when he was thirteen and one shortly before he left Shanghai for good, and they didn't last either.

He wonders if all Jaeger pilots are this fundamentally lonely, too comfortable with each other, too in love with each other to ever separate.

He wonders if it ever fades, this frightening, beautiful, all-compassing oneness.

He wonders if the Wei triplets will ever Drift again-

His thoughts are rather rudely interrupted by a sudden lurch as the pod hits something, sending the younger Dragons nearly overboard. Someone yelps in pain.

「Hu! Jin!」

「I'm okay. Hu's okay. Wow, I think I sprained my ass bone. The little tail part.」

Cheung sighs inwardly. Even in times of hopelessness, and with a probably broken wrist, Jin would be the one to manage to perform a bit of classic slapstick.

The pod keeps bumping into the obstacles floating around them-

「Debris,」 says Jin with sudden surprise from the other end of the pod. He leans over a little bit to touch the floating miscellany, and the entire pod tips a fraction of a degree.「There's debris, even this far out. It's probably from the fight.」

「No, really?」

「Shut up, Hu.」

Cheung almost starts to kick again, but then Jin's voice comes floating dangerously through the drizzle, 「Brothers… It's parts from Cherno Alpha.」

The Dragons pause.

「…Do you think they survived?」 Hu asks quietly into the darkness.

The Weis enlisted in the Jaeger Academy only two months after Sasha Kaidanovsky (then Sasha Tsvetkova), and one month before Aleksis Kaidanovsky, ten years ago in 2015. Cheung doesn't remember much of them, only recalling that his initial instinct when he first laid eyes on Aleksis Kaidanovsky in the hallways was to freeze, grab his brothers by their wrists and slowly march in the opposite direction. They didn't think anything of them until they were deployed against the same Kaiju- Crimson Typhoon and Cherno Alpha's first duo kill was in 2019, in Osaka. It was the Wei's first battle, and their first victory. Before their final battle, they only fought together one more time afterwards, in Ho Chih Minh City, and besides a few awkward incidents in the Shatterdome and at Tendo Choi's 'fundraising' (illegal smuggling) meetings after their budget was cut entirely, the Weis have not had any reason to deal with the Russians. But the memory of their first run in their beautiful, shining red beacon of hope remains deeply embedded in their memories, and a flare of pain passes through Cheung like a little electric shock from a socket.

They will never see Crimson Typhoon again, and the Kaidanovskys may be gone as well. That part of their life is over.

「… Maybe.」

Cheung grits his teeth and starts to kick again, suddenly very aware of every piece of detritus that floats by.

A little voice hisses, echoing in the frighteningly vast, chilling darkness, _「This was your doing.」_

 

January 9th, 2025  
1:14 AM

Cheung isn't aware that he's barely making a ripple on the surface of the water, legs fatigued and mind incredibly dizzy, when Jin's hand comes down over the rim of the pod and raps gently at the stubble on the top of his fuzzy skull.

「Hey, get out of the water. My turn.」

「Go back and make sure that Hu isn't dying.」

From the inside of the pod, Hu's voice springs up, biting and tinged with barely-suppressed pain, 「I can hear you, you know,」 and Jin laughs.

「He's been dripping shark bait water. You should look at the bandages again. Come on, get up. I've already skipped about a thousand turns and you're useless after going at it nonstop for an hour. No wonder Mei dumped you.」

Cheung suddenly growls, much harsher than he meant to sound, 「Sit back down on your useless ass, Jin,」 and immediately regrets it. He is silent for a moment, and sighs. 「Give me a minute to rest and I'll start again.」

「No, you won't,」 Jin replies, and his voice is uncharacteristically sharp. 「I meant it, Cheung. You're going to kill yourself in that water. Get out or I'll just jump in and join you, and what'll happen if we're both tired and a random wind starts blowing us away?」

The first Dragon hears the unmistakable thud of Jaeger Suit pieces being dropped on the floor, and something completely irrational and panicked from deep inside him wells up and bursts out, 「No! No, stop. I'll keep going- Just stay with Hu- Stop-」

「Cheung,」 says Hu from out of nowhere, in his dangerous voice, all pretense of calmness and sweetly lilted vowels through teeth clenched from pain and fatigue, 「are you doing that thing that you do where you mentally beat yourself up for the craziest things?」

Cheung doesn't reply.

There are no lies between them.

The guilty silence that threatens to stretch out between them, weary and tired and twenty-six years in the making, falls heavily on Cheung's shoulders, and he gently rests his head on the side of the brothers' shared pod. He is suddenly very grateful for the mist, because the shame creeps up the back of his neck, undoubtedly painting it an ugly shade of lobster-red. There is no use pretending not to know what Hu is talking about. The younger Dragons have seen it, and felt it, in the drift, and though they do not confront him about it, every time they nearly chase those rabbits, their mouths are set in identical, firm lines, begrudging and profoundly annoyed. Cheung opens his mouth to speak, finds no words, and closes it again.

The voice hisses, _「You should feel ashamed. Hu is bleeding out and Jin's bones are broken. You are the eldest. You were born first. They are your charge. It should have been you. This is your doing-」_

And suddenly it is interrupted by a wild yodel and a splash, and before Cheung can react Jin emerges from the depths, shaking his head and spraying water everywhere.

「Ah, shit, this is so fucking cold.」

「Your arm,」 Cheung croaks out in alarm, but Jin firmly latches on to the pod with his left hand and pushes Cheung away with a foot.

「If you're so worried, then get out of the water and hold my wrist so I don't slip.」

Cheung swallows, screws his eyes shut and then slowly, deliberately, unwillingly, lifts himself out of the ocean and half-rolls back into the Wei's shared pod. He starts to shiver almost immediately, and Hu chuckles in the darkness. His warm left hand reaches out and grasps Cheung's wrist, and pulls him closer. 「Come on, brother. Make yourself useful and play at being a pillow again.」

The eldest Dragon scoots himself painfully around, folding his legs down the length of the pod and easing Hu's head on his lap. Though his hands are still stiff and freezing cold, he reaches over the rim and rests one hand securely over Jin's, and it comforts him to brush his fingers over calloused knuckles.

Once the dizziness and the worst of the chills pass, Cheung looks out over the sea. The rain has mostly stopped, but the darkness remains at eternal constant, shrouding everything in an unyielding black. The distant glow of the far-off Pok Liu Island shoreline, dotted and hazy, is the only thing he can really see- and it doesn't look any different than an hour before. Uncertain, he stutters, 「Are you sure we're closer than before?」

Jin's voice comes rippling from somewhere over the lip of the pod. 「Yeah. I watched it the whole time. We're making progress. It's only the mist that's making it seem a little cloudier than before.」

Suddenly, Jin laughs, gets a mouthful of seawater, spits it out, and then laughs again.

「What now, idiot?」

「Remember when we were little, and we thought it would be cool to be pirates?」 says Jin, breathless. 「Did you imagine sailing would be anything like this?」

Cheung feels the weight of his second brother on his lap, and hears his harsh, ragged breathing- Hu may be the eloquent one, but his acting skills cannot fool his brothers. Cheung smells his blood, and his fear, piercing through the salty, briny mist and swallows roughly.

「No.」

 

2:09 AM

Jin's voice suddenly breaks the silence, high-pitched with surprise.

「Hey, is that… a person?」

That is the last thing Cheung would have guessed would come from Jin's mouth- and Jin says the strangest things. He stops padding through the water immediately and half-chokes, 「What?」

「Over there. I see a person. In a… really little boat. A fisherman?」

「Way out here, and so early?」 Hu mumbles. 「Call out to him just in case you aren't hallucinating.」

Jin half-screams, half-yodels, 「He-e-ey! Hey, Mr. Boat Man! Hello!」

Cheung freezes in the water and grasps the lip of the boat tight, hoping against all odds that Jin is right, and strains his ears in the darkness for just a sound, any sound, any other human who might be able to help-

And a deep, familiar voice, from quite a distance away, lets out a surprised grunt.

It's one of the Kaidanovskys.

Jin hollers happily, this time in English, "Hello! It's us, it's Crimson Typhoon!"

There is no answer, but Cheung hears the sound of something hitting the water repeatedly, and soon he feels a ripple across the surface of the sea as the sound grows closer and closer. He edges across the pod, crossing his hands and making his way around the open lip, until he is at the other side, and he sees, silhouetted against the far-off haze of Hong Kong, Aleksis Kaidanovsky, sitting alone in his half-crushed pod. There is no mistaking those almost freakishly broad shoulders and mismatched hair. He's holding a piece of twisted metal in his hands to use as a rude oar, and Cheung has no doubt that he might have shaped it himself, with his bare hands.

This doesn't worry Cheung.

It worries him that he is alone.

When the Russian's pod bumps into their own, Hu speaks up, in his fluid, easy way, even as he drifts in and out of sleep in Jin's lap, "We're glad you survived."

Aleksis does not reply, but only half-growls two words, in English: "My wife."

Hu immediately replies as loudly as he can, voice deceptively calm even though everyone can clearly tell that he is slowly dripping pinkish water into the Wei's pod, "We haven't seen her."

Wordlessly, the Russian nods and dips his makeshift oar back into the water, flicking up an alarming amount of water with every stroke as he pushes forwards, not towards the shore, but to the east, through the obstacle course of debris.

When he is a safe distance away, Jin switches back to their usual Shanghai Wu Chinese dialect. 「The lady one- Sasha- is probably not dead, then.」

Hu hums, 「How do you figure?」

「Come on. We've seen her in the Kwoon. She's really scary. Once she sparred with, like, ten guys at a time and most of them dislocated something, remember? If anyone could survive ejecting through a bunch of water and wreckage, it's probably gonna be her.」

「That's… some faulty-ass logic, Jin. Sparring is very different from escaping a destroyed Jaeger.」

Cheung feels rather than sees Jin's frown. 「I mean it. I can't imagine her dying. She's, like, almost as tall as us. And she's probably more built up, too. And she eats twice as much as we do. And drinks a hundred times as much. And she's kinda hot. And she's their Talky One. She's totally alive. She just surfaced a little further away, probably.」

His voice is full of barely-hidden worry, impossible hope, and a dangerous little lilt of denial.

Jin was always the optimist.

Cheung keeps kicking as furiously as he can, mostly to get closer to the shore, but partly to make as much white noise as possible and partially to drown out the worry creeping into his own mind. Jin is undoubtedly projecting- if a tough soldier like Lieutenant Kaidanovsky is dead, then the Weis, skinner and ill-fed in childhood, have worse luck than Cheung might have feared. Even escaping the Conn-Pod on time had been a miracle- but Hu is still ripped open, and the Dragons have just had their first real thought that they might not make it after all.

Jin says suddenly, as if he has just thought of something, 「Brothers, the Russian guy's pod was damaged, like ours. Maybe his tracking system is broken too.」

「… So maybe they're not going to send helicopters after all,」 says Hu quietly, into the dark, cold, vast emptiness around the triplets. 「The Russians ejected, but they didn't come for them, either. Maybe they think we're all dead…. or… Maybe we're useless to them, now that we don't have Crimson Typhoon anymore-」

Cheung interrupts Hu, stiffly, 「Shut up. We don't need a helicopter. We're going to get to shore fast enough, so quit talking and concentrate on not bleeding.」

「Brother,」 Hu replies dryly, 「You can't stop bleeding by concentrating.」

「You never know until you try,」 says Jin, more cheerfully than before. 「You might secretly be a Chi master without even knowing it.」

 

3:17 AM

A sharp, far-off voice calls out from somewhere in the fog, echoing over the surface like a banshee.

Cheung jerks in his seat, and Hu awakens abruptly, no doubt startled by the sudden jostle. Immediately guilty, Cheung settles his hand over Hu's brow by way of apology and his brother stills, groaning a bit. Jin stops kicking, panting from cold and exertion, and whispers shrilly, 「What was that?」

「You heard it too?」

「Sounded like a ghost.」

The brothers listen for it again, and soon the sound hits them again, from closer to their left. The brothers share a look, and then Cheung screams as loud as he can in response. They hear furious splashing, and when Cheung strains his neck to try and see through the gloomy, impossibly blue mists, he starts to see a shape take form several meters away. "Hey," he yells, waving his arms above his head. "Hey! Over here!"

The far-off figure answers back in rapid-fire Russian, which Cheung can't speak more than ten words of, but he is immediately under the vague impression that Sasha Kaidanovsky has just sworn at them.

Jin thrusts a triumphant fist into the surface of the sea, splashing water everywhere, and hollers. 「Yes! I knew she was still alive!」

All three brothers yell as loudly as they can, and Cheung doesn't stop frantically waving until Kaidanovsky's pod comes closer towards them, and Cheung can make out her silhouette clearly even in the gloom. Though he supposes to himself that he ought to be glad that she is safe, he only looks at the completely destroyed front end of her ejection pod - it's not as technologically advanced as Cheung's Mark V model, but somewhere deep inside of him, Cheung had harbored the hope that one of the Russians' pods might have survived the destruction of the battle.

The air is calmer now, the ocean less likely to toss the brothers around like dried dates in a basket. The chill sets deeper through Cheung's bones as the dim, blue light starts to peek through the clouds overhead, bouncing off of the light canopy of the last, ice-cold raindrops, illuminating the sea with a deep glow. Cheung is sure by now that that LOCCENT never got the ejection alert at all- there are no helicopters overhead, no boats speeding towards them. There is only the water, the fine, airy drizzle, and the mist that threatens to obscure the shoreline with every passing minute.

Sahsa Kaidanovsky struggles somewhat to re-enter her pod, which takes Cheung completely by surprise until he notices that she is cradling her arm close to her torso, held flush to her body and painstakingly splinted with a strip torn neatly from the lining of her pod and a scrap of aluminum. When she tumbles inside, somehow still radiating an aura of power and strength with her moon-yellow hair plastered artlessly to her cheeks, she gives the triplets a quick once-over, staring at Hu for a fraction of a second longer than the others.

Her English is clipped and round-vowelled. "My husband."

For a moment there is silence between them, as Hu struggles to speak, but Jin gently taps at Hu's chest and answers for him, taking up the place of the Talky One to answer, "We saw him. He looked uninjured."

"He asked for you," Cheung says, and then he snaps his mouth shut, feeling very awkward as soon the words leave his mouth. Of course he'd ask for her. They're married.

The Russian's shoulders immediately relax, and Cheung might swear that he sees her posture droop with relief for a split second before she's back to her usual straight-spined self. "Where?"

"Over… there?"

In the fog, Cheung realizes, a little embarrassed at Jin's stupidity, pointing and looking around is rather useless. Though the brothers can still see the shore through the haze, they have no idea where Aleksis Kaidanovsky might have gone.

Jin shakes his head ruefully and hitches himself higher, hooking his good arm over the lip of the Wei's pod to give their guest an apologetic grin. "Maybe one hour ago, we saw him. He was rowing his pod like a kayak. Maybe going towards the battle site, looking for you."

"One hour ago I was still unconscious," Sasha replies, looking and sounding more distracted than Cheung has ever seen her. She arches her head to try and see past the rapidly encroaching mist, as if desperately searching for a sign of her husband, and Cheung suddenly understands her.

In the end, he thinks dully, hoping that Hu cannot see his face as it twists into an ugly knot, in the end Sasha Kaidanovsky is not just a scary white woman with a mouth full of sharp teeth and a head full of shiny, bread-colored hair. She is not their fellow Jaeger Program trainee, or their one-time, reluctant partner in crime, or even their former teammate in battle. She is one of the few people on the planet who has Drifted time and time again with someone she loves, and that is an experience unique enough that Cheung thinks that perhaps they might understand each other without any meaningful words ever passed between them.

Her unguarded expression matches that of his dark, irrational feelings when he thinks, beyond all reason and judgement, that everything that happens to his brothers is-

-all his doing-

_「All your doing, all your doing.」_

Cheung shakes his head and, when that doesn't work, gently sets Hu's head down to dive headfirst into the ocean.

The water chills him to his core- everything contracts and twitches and fights against the water. He stays under until his head clears, until everything is white noise and the thundering in his heart, and when his lungs feel ready to burst he surfaces where Jin hangs over the lip of the pod.

「Jin, get in,」 Cheung says, clenching his jaw firmly shut to stop his teeth from clacking uncontrollably against each other. He then realizes that he spoke in Shanghainese, and then switches to English. It isn't worth alienating Kaidanovsky now, of all times. "It's my turn."

Sasha eyes Jin as he clambers aboard, brushing most of the water off of his bodysuit before inching his thighs gently under Hu's head, and then she gives Cheung an odd expression. He can't quite tell what she means by it, but it doesn't matter.

"Lieutenant, we are headed towards the shore to find help for my brother. Your husband might be headed there as well after realizing that you weren't in the wreck. Two of us are hurt, and we would appreciate it enormously if you could swim with us, if only to make sure we make progress."

She looks at him, silhouetted and still as a statue, and then nods once.

The four of them make way as soon as she eases herself into the water again, mindful of her arm, and the two pods begin making way through the emptiness, two lifeboats surging through and fighting the waves that push them further from their destination. Once in a while Sasha Kaidanovsky screams some Russian into the winds, but if there is an answer, it is always swallowed up by the clamor of the crashing waves and the clanging echoes of the remains of their Jaegers colliding and sinking deep into the bay, never to carry them into battle again.

The closer they get to the actual shore, the more the water smells of chemicals- harsh, slimy oil floating above the surface of the water, the slight, acrid tang of Kaiju Blue slowly dissipating into the depths.

The first time Cheung smelled Kaiju Blue in person, he was eighteen, and the brothers were goofing off in the hallways of the Hong Kong, passing a basketball between them and generally making themselves complete nuisances. Cheung remembers a team of scientists, headed by two very angry men squabbling like children and yanking a manila folder between them, furiously carting a bubbling, rusting tank through the corridor. They rounded a corner too sharply, and the tank nearly toppled from the dolly, spilling a puddle of bright blue water to the floor that just narrowly avoided Jin's feet.

The smell eventually went away, but the stain, shimmering greenish brown, remained, and every time the triplets passed by that same hallway Cheung thought of the Kaiju, toxic and unimaginably dangerous-

Back then, he thought it might be fun to fight one, with his brothers alongside him, in their very own Jaeger.

Now, most of Shanghai is destroyed. Their childhood homes are gone, their neighbors dead, many of Jin's former girlfriends living on only in the Drift. Crimson Typhoon has had its sea burial, and Cheung has failed.

He has failed-

_「And you might fail again. Can you smell it? It's Hu's blood. It doesn't matter anymore if Crimson Typhoon and Shanghai's Three Red Dragons cannot close the Breach. It doesn't matter if- if- if」_

_「-if-」_

「No,」 Cheung thinks, and the word ripples through his entire being. He bites his lower lip hard enough to taste blood, but it is washed away by the water. He dips his head under, not bothering to take a breath before he sinks under the surface, and kicks as hard as he can. The voice cannot whisper to him, he rationalizes wildly, if he cannot even hear himself.

Every time his head dissolves into a mindless buzz, like static on the television or the hum of a microwave, or the high, piercing shriek when he is punched on the ear, he surfaces, takes in another lungful of coppery air, and dunks back down into the ocean, muscles screaming and heart pounding into his ribcage.

In the end, it isn't so much a punishment for himself but more mindless, calming exercise.

He cannot think of Hu dying.

He cannot.

He will not.

 

3:31 AM

In the growing light when the fog finally begins to clear, Cheung looks over the brim of the pod to see if he can spot a landmark, or a head of yellow-and-black hair, when he sees Sasha Kaidanovsky's face clearly for the first time since before the battle and nearly stops kicking.

The entire lower half of her face is bright red, and for a wild moment Cheung wonders if her lower lip has been scraped off, and she has been speaking without it the whole time- really, she seems like that type- but he soon realizes that the greasy, slick color painting everything from the underside of her nose down is her lipstick, spread everywhere by the rain and the seawater. She hasn't bothered to wipe it away, and now, Cheung privately thinks to himself, she looks like a woman who has just ripped a man's balls off with her teeth in a B-movie.

The water is freezing-cold, but almost impossibly, Cheung shrinks closer into his groin at the mental image.

"Aleksis," Sasha screams into the fog once more, and when there is no answer, she clears her throat and sighs almost violently on to the surface of the water, her breath fogging up her face like cigarette smoke. The disappointment flashes across her face, eyebrows drawing close together and twisting her already frightening mask of ice into almost a caricature of frustration.

Hu, though he cannot see it, seems to be able to tell. "We will find him."

Sasha's face snaps up, and she stares at the side of the Wei's pod. Eventually she makes an agreeable noise in the back of her throat and continues to push her pod.

She stops almost immediately afterwards, and Cheung follows suit.

"Did you hear-"

"Ssh!"

Sasha brings her good hand up to her red-stained lips and silences him. She remains unmoving, every cell in her body tensed up like a wild cat in a nature documentary, quiet and still just before it pounces. Cheung strains his ear out through the fog, and though he can only hear the water, he sees Sasha's face light up like a neon sign. Her brilliant white teeth flash even in the dim blue haze, and immediately she lets go of her pod and begins to swim away, yelling "Aleksis!" every time she comes up to breathe.

Cheung cannot afford to stop, but now that he is sure that she knows where she is going, he grabs on to the Wei's pod and keeps moving forward, knowing that the sound of his kicks will not obscure her voice.

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Sasha Kaidanovsky head further west, not quite in the opposite direction of the Wei's boat but definitely not towards Pok Liu. Even with one working arm, she swims like she was meant for the water, and a flare of incredible respect shoots through Cheung. She is not aware of the pain now, he realizes somewhat belatedly, craning his neck back to stare at her progress even as he aims his own pod towards the shoreline. She is only thinking of her co-pilot, Drift partner and husband. The pain is nothing to her.

Soon, Cheung hears a voice answer her- muffled in the winds and waves somewhat, but still unmistakably large, deep and very Russian. The two voices call to each other, mixed with inscrutable emotions, and then Cheung sees Aleksis Kaidanovsky again, rowing furiously through the last of the fog, a little dot on the unending waters.

Jin yells excitedly, 「There he is!」

Cheung cannot see Hu smile, but he knows that he does.

Sasha Kaidanovsky shoots straight for the figure in the distance, parting the waters with incredible strength, as Jin excitedly narrates for Hu like it is an Olympic event. "большая Медведица," she yells when they are close enough for words, and in the distance, the yellow-and-black head bobs up and replies back, in an inscrutable tone,"Малая Медведица."

It seems to be enough to placate the two. No other words are exchanged, and Cheung can't help but wonder if he has just witnessed a secret Russian prison code being passed across the water. When the couple finally reaches each other, he averts his eyes to give them some privacy- after all, they are married- but Jin's I'm-making-an-immature-face voice says, 「Oh wow, they're kissing and now his face looks like he just ate her out while she's on her p-」

「Jin,」 Cheung warns, and Hu laughs.

His laugh is weak, and it fades off at the edges.

 

4:22 AM

Cheung lets Jin propel the pod until even his good hand slips off the edge and he barely suppresses a whimper of pain. Snarling bitten-off curses, Cheung forces him back in and checks his wrist, eyes screwing shut of their own accord when he see the bruising mottling Jin's thin wrist and the odd angle of the bones beneath.

When Jin tries to protest, Cheung resists the urge to smack him upside the head and merely hisses beneath his breath, 「What, you think watching Hu is a lesser task than pushing the pod?」

「I'm literally lying right here. I can hear you.」

「Go back to sleep, Hu,」 Cheung grits between his teeth, and lowers himself back into the frigid water without another word. Thankfully, the younger Dragons listen to him.

He wonders if it's immoral to abuse his Eldest Sibling privilege like this.

Before the voice can creep back into him, Cheung plunges his head under the water, and it drowns out the voice again.

The Kaidanovskys, now sharing Aleksis's pod, are slowly but surely making the same progress as the Wei's. They remain a fair distance away at first, with Sasha almost completely in Aleksis's lap as he rows with both enormous hands towards the ever-approaching shore, but as the sun begins to rise above the horizon, blinking little flecks of new light across the surface of the ocean, they come closer, and closer, until only a few meters separate their pods.

From this distance, and in the clearer beginnings of dawn light, Cheung can see why Aleksis Kaidanovsky chose to row instead of swim- a series of ugly gashes tears through his back like claw marks from a bear, and though most of them have already closed up with gruesome, black-brown scabs, some are beginning to show telltale signs of infection, curling at the edges and darkening beneath the skin.

Cheung thinks of Hu's open skin beneath the bandages, and trembles.

They travel alongside each other, with Aleksis rowing carefully, all pale, bare arms and huge muscles shifting beneath tattooed skin, and Cheung pushing the pod, in complete silence.

It is only when Cheung's aching legs can't take the water anymore and he emerges to softly pry Hu's Jaeger Suit plates apart to check for infection, when Sasha speaks to them from across the meager distance, "Is he in danger?"

The pause that settles over the Weis is almost comical in its sheer length. Both Cheung and Jin, by reflex, were expecting Hu to answer, forgetting in their worry that Hu is asleep, and it seems like an act of betrayal to usurp that position. Eventually Jin opens his mouth and stumbles over the English, "He was scraped against the side of Crimson Typhoon when it sank. He is losing a lot of blood, but it might be all right if we get help on time."

"No infection?"

Cheung's heart sinks down to his chest when he finally says, out loud and indelible in its truthiness, "A little. Probably from the Kaiju Blue."

Sasha nods, expression inscrutable, but Aleksis makes no indication that he has even heard them speak. They mutter to each other in rapid, loose-vowelled Russian, and then Sasha says, "It will probably be all right," somewhat awkwardly.

Jin laughs through his nose. "We didn't know until just now. He didn't say anything. It's just like him to act as if nothing is wrong."

"It is?" asks Sasha, a little carefully, not taking her eyes off of the Weis. Cheung thinks she might be genuinely curious. Maybe.

Jin nods enthusiastically. "I usually complain loudly. Cheung deals with his problems himself. But Hu always tries to find a way to make it sound as if it is nothing, like he can make the problem go away by convincing everybody, even himself, that it is not there. He uses his words like weapons," Jin laughs. "We do not lie to each other. How can we, you know, in the Drift? But even before that, we never lied. But one day when we were maybe six, all three of us got our asses kicked by this big bully in our old school in Shanghai. I screamed about my bruises so loud that our mother almost bathed me in tiger balm. Cheung wrapped his own hand in bandages and left it. But Hu pretended that nothing was wrong, and he made it sound like he took out his front tooth all on his own, just so he could be the first one to lose a tooth."

Eventually, Jin's babbling becomes calming white noise, and he doesn't stop relaying stupid stories as Cheung slips quietly back into the water to tread against an incoming wind, and Aleksis Kaidanovsky rows with them. Jin's stories are disjointed, and he often asks Cheung for translations for difficult words, but as he speaks, Jin calms down, and they let him chatter.

"We didn't even stop street fighting while we studied for the Jaeger program. But our last fight, I really want to go back in time to punch myself in the face. It was so stupid. We didn't even need the money at that point but it was like a pride thing, you know? The other guy was the biggest gangster in Taipei, not as big as Aleksis but-"

Both husband and wife whip their heads towards Jin, and though the younger carries on babbling, mostly to fill up the silence, the elder immediately grits his teeth, his fists clenching up almost against his will. The triplets' past is years behind them, and for that Cheung is infinitely glad, but the instinct remains in his bones, a deep, secret mantra that taps at the inside of his skull in every waking moment- 「 Protect my brothers. Protect Hu and Jin. They are my charge. Protect them.」 Sasha Kaidanovsky has no reason not to trust the Weis, but she cannot hide her reflexes, and they give away the thoughts her careful glacier face hides. Unable to keep silent, and unwilling to keep up pretenses if it means the difference between survival and death, he mutters between his teeth, locking eyes with the woman, and says, "You can't trust a brother Jaeger pilot, even after fighting three Kaiju with him?"

At this, Aleksis turns his head away immediately, and Cheung only catches the briefest glimpse of his smile- a smile- because the very sight of it shocks him, but then Sasha laughs.

It is only then that Cheung is able to see perhaps one of the many facets of Sasha Kaidanovsky, with her yellow-white hair plastered to her brow line, lower jaw hopelessly smeared with bright blood-red lipstick and her head thrown back like there is nothing to worry about in the whole world. She laughs with her entire body, a surprising, slightly intimidating and wholly unpredictable laugh that shakes the entire pod, all 32 gleaming white teeth glinting in the dark blue haze.

Jin covers Hu's ear with one hand automatically and murmurs to himself, 「 Whoa.」

"What's funny?" Cheung asks, partly because he is actually unsure if he has actually made an accidental joke and partly because he wants to make sure that their fellow survivor hasn't swallowed too much seawater before punching her face.

Sasha leans into her husband, laughter still sticking in her throat, and she drawls, bringing her unhurt arm to her forehead and sighing in a way that sounds partially guilty and partially triumphant, "My name is also Aleksis."

Both conscious Wei triplets fail to respond, and Sasha (Aleksis?) laughs again. The man swims faster than Cheung can, and he fights to keep up as the woman speaks.

"Sasha is a Russian nickname. Nickname for Aleksis is 'Alyosha', but sometimes 'Sasha' for shortening 'Aleks'. It's usually a name for boys, but my father, he wanted to be modern, to be cool. 'Plenty of Russian and even American girls named Aleksis in this world,' he said to me, 'so don't complain that you were named for your grandfather. It was either Aleksis or Vladislav like your mother's father.' So I didn't complain. And then I met my own Aleksis," Sasha continues, bright-eyed, showing her teeth and nudging her husband, "and it was fun to confuse everyone in the Shatterdome because sometimes I called him Sasha, and sometimes he called me Sasha, and sometimes we were both Aleksis. Like… prank? In Hong Kong we didn't switch so much, so maybe it sounds like a lie, but I promise my name really is Aleksis Kaidonovskava."

It is the longest speech Cheung has ever heard from either Russian. He ducks his head, wondering if he ought to apologize and deciding that he should, when Aleksis (the man) suddenly says, in a voice deep enough to vibrate the Wei's pod, "Do not feel bad. We do not know who is who for you either."

"He is Hu", says Jin, pointing down at the brother cradled in his lap.

"I don't know. Who?"

"Hu."

"He is who?" asks Sasha, eyebrow raised.

"Yes."

Cheung can feel a headache coming on. "We are the Weis. I am Wei Cheung. He is Wei Jin. And he," he says, indicating with his chin to the brother breathing softly into Jin's lap, "is Wei Hu."

"I see. He is your Talker," Sasha murmurs, and Cheung knows that she understands.

Even before the Wei Triplets Drifted, Hu was always the first to speak. Cheung would worry too much- stumble over his words, almost paranoid, too tense. Jin quickly learned that it was best if he didn't speak at all, after his jokes drew the eyes of too many older, taller, bigger boys in dirty alleyways. But Hu always knew what to say.

And now, Hu is breathing shallowly, bound up tight under a thoroughly destroyed Jaeger Suit, slowly dripping pink and lining their pod with sticky, coppery blood, unable to speak for them.

Cheung bites the inside of his mouth, unable to make eye contact with the Kaidanovskys, and he dips his chin beneath the water. "I'm sorry we are awkward conversation partners. There is only so much we have in common."

"We have survived despite all odds," Sasha Kaidanovsky says, shrugging her good shoulder. "And now we are, all five of us, unemployed and possibly without homes. Shanghai… You did your best."

"Our best was not good enough," Cheung spits out, but regrets his words immediately afterwards. He smoothes his palm over his head of stubble and quickly adds, "Our home has been the Shatterdome in Hong Kong for almost a decade. It still stands, and though we may not be welcome there anymore it still exists, and that is of some comfort. The same cannot be said for Vladivostok."

The Russian's voice must naturally be shaved from a glacier, Cheung privately thinks. He truly cannot tell if she is being perfectly serious or a bit self-consciously sarcastic as she replies, leaning flush against her husband, "They say that home is where your loved ones are. Of course, is a sappy saying, like a Hallmark card. But very true. I still have my big bear, and though Vladivostok and Cherno Alpha are gone, I will have a place to belong if Striker and Gipsy fail, and the world ends. Maybe at a time like this it is not so sappy to think such things."

"… It isn't so sappy," says Cheung slowly.

The Wei triplets were born on Christmas Eve. They have earned their fair share of cheap Christmas cards, each one lamer than the next, but Cheung is not one to ignore any nuggets of wisdom, freely given.

"Do you not have someone waiting for you?" asks Sasha, and Cheung can't decide if she sounds coldly detached, genuinely interested, or piteous.

"… Jin has four girlfriends," he answers finally, when Jin fails to. "And Hu has a boyfriend. Or, at least, we think he is his boyfriend."

"And you?"

"No one-"

Jin interrupts him. "My girlfriends are all too good for me, Sasha. And Hu's boyfriend will soon see that he is now a worthless, unemployed twenty-six-year-old man without enough blood in him to get it up, and he will dump him." He laughs gently, hand covering Hu's ear to let him sleep. "Cheung will grow old unmarried, probably, and me and Hu too. It is all fine. We have each other. And we belong together."

Cheung's throat dries up.

Sasha smiles softly (perhaps unintentionally) at Jin. "I always wondered if it was the same with all pilots."

"It is the same. In Chinese culture, the number three is auspicious. There are three steps in a man's- or woman's- life. Birth, marriage, and death. For us," Jin says, staring at down at Hu, grin knife-edged and eyes watering up with irrepressible tears, "for us, everything is three. Everything is together. We were born together, and we are married to each other, and if we die together, it is just the way it was meant to be."

Jin's shoulders shake, and Cheung can only swim, both undamaged hands grasping the side of the pod as if letting go means letting go of his family for good, letting the ice-cold water close over his head. He kicks with all of his might towards the shore, his muscles burning, his heart beating a staccato rhythm into his ribcage. There is no time to rest.

His brothers are his charge.

They are his charge.

This is _all his doing-_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is unbeta'd, and for the unbalanced length. The final chapter will be up soon.
> 
> I apologize if the spatial setup is a little off, and for any language discrepancies.
> 
> I was influenced by a lot of Wei Triplets fan art and fics- thank you, everyone, for being a part of this wonderful fandom. Every comment is precious to me, so please leave one if you can.


	3. Death

4:57 AM

When the last of the mist clears, dewy sunlight now pouring directly over the South China Sea, it's obvious that Striker Eureka is long gone, its distinctive silhouette nowhere to be seen across the seemingly endless ocean in the bay. Aleksis Kaidanovsky (the man) confirms with low grunts that Striker Eureka was not destroyed in the battle, so Jin, completely uncharacteristically, immediately comes to the conclusion that it must have been lifted out by the helicopters. The third Dragon spits colorful curses towards the sky under his breath, bubbling up the water where it rushes over his chin.

「They didn't even do one cursory check to see if we were still alive? Assholes. Just wait and see, when this is all over I'm giving the worst interviews about them. "Oh, Ms. Sokolov- can I call you Naomi?- Naomi, you wouldn't believe it. We were involved with the PPDC, what, nine years? Ten? They send us out during a double event and no one told us that these ones were different, that they'd target our weaknesses… And those sons of pigs left us for dead, floating ten thousand kilometers from Hong Kong…"」

「We drifted further than anyone could have imagined was physically possible, Jin,」 Cheung manages to say, though he can't quell his own sudden burst of anger. He bites the fleshy inside of his mouth, hard, finds some comfort in the pain, and he fixates on it instead of Hu, shivering in his sleep on his lap. 「They didn't expect for us to be caught in the Kaiju waves and shot so far out of Victoria Harbor. In fact, since we didn't even manage to stay near Kowloon at all it's almost stupid to try and find us in that storm.」 Cheung tries to warm Hu through the metal of his Dragon-red Jaeger suit, rubbing his palm over his cheek gently, but he knows that he can't ward off the January chill for long.

At their side, the Kaidanovskys take turns standing up to wave their arms towards the approaching shore, hoping that someone might see and send out a boat to investigate. Cheung doubts it. Since Reckoner, no one in Hong Kong has sailed alone, and there are no boats in either Lamma Channel, as far as he can tell. One would be crazy to come out now, so fast after the last attack.

Vaguely, he wonders if the Hansens, Pentecost's daughter, and the American boy with the dead brother are gone, and there are no Jaegers left in the world.

Somehow, Cheung thinks, the possibility is more sad than frightening.

He can't tell if Hong Kong is destroyed, even as they start to truly close in on Pok Liu- the wind shifts them eastward, and the main island is obscured by the high-rise buildings of Victoria Park, far enough away to look like little pebbles lined up flush against the shoreline, and the mountainous edges of Lamma Island. Thankfully, the tide starts bringing them closer, as if the ocean has decided to have mercy on the Triplets for finally demonizing their alleged rescuers instead of itself. Jin keeps babbling, almost just to himself, in their loose and almost embarrassingly dirty Shanghainese, and Cheung doesn't even care that perhaps his brother sounds like he has swallowed too much seawater. The Russians don't understand their dialect anyway.

Whenever Cheung gently rips away Hu's makeshift bandages to apply a relatively clean strip torn from the padding inside their escape pod, Hu stirs, eyebrows knitting together and cheeks hollowing, making his cheekbones stand out under the stark, wintery light. Cheung grits his teeth whenever Hu's blood starts to slick his fingers, the bandages slipping over the seawater-damp scraps of his Jaeger suit and grazing the angry flesh beneath.

As the Kaidanovskys survey their brightening settings, always touching each other, Hu squirms, and Cheung rests one hand on his scratched, dented chest plate, stony-faced and silent.

Sasha (the woman) wipes away the greasy red lipstick still clinging to her husband's lower lip and beard when they both lose patience in waiting for any rescue boats, and stays still as he returns the favor. They give each other bruising kisses every so often, as if to wordlessly confirm that they are both alive, and Cheung knows that they are both eyeing Hu with some measure of sympathy, and more than a little bit of hidden relief that at least they aren't bleeding out into their pod. Aleksis's back is still festering with cross-crossed scabs, tearing open again and again as he flexes his back, rowing to keep pace with the Weis, but if he is in any pain, he shows no indication of it.

Soon, Cheung realizes, Jin's angry chatter quietly comes to a halt, and is replaced by heavy breathing and tiny, almost inaudible groans. His kicks slow down, and the knuckles peeking over the open lip of the Wei's red-painted pod grow paler.

「Jin,」 Cheung murmurs, swallowing his growing horror and forcing his voice to stay calm, 「Get out of the water. It's my turn.」

「No,」 comes Jin's voice, petulant and strained, and the kicks speed up, though they're uncoordinated and almost jittery, uneven in pacing. His muscles are giving out, Cheung realizes, the dark, whispery thing growing restlessly in the pit of his chest, just as Cheung's had almost done immediately before they switched places last. The triplets are strong, and they were more than ready to face the Kaiju the night before, but piloting a Jaeger is very different from swimming while pushing an awkwardly large, crappily designed flotation device for six hours.

「What was that you told me about dying in the water?」

「We're so close now. Just shut up and let me-」

Without warning, Hu awakens suddenly with a strangled gasp and his left hand immediately jerks up to scratch at his bound leg, and Cheung nearly bites his own tongue off in surprise.

He tries to wrestle Hu's hand away from where it is scrabbling, but Hu presses hard into the wound and screams-

-and-

-everything in Cheung's body is on fire, and his leg-

-burning-

Jin immediately stops kicking, and Cheung freezes, despite himself, for a fraction of a second before he moves again, yanking Hu's good hand away from the gash (slick with blood and something else, something slimy and slightly grayish) and firmly cupping his jaw.

「Hu! Hu, you have to stop!」

Eyes perfectly identical to Cheung's shoot open, and Hu's face twists and contorts-

-it burns-

-he feels so weak-

\- and as the last of his strength threatens to dissipate from his bones, replaced by an unforgiving frozen stiffness, Hu finally stops thrashing. His good arm comes up to grip Cheung's shoulder, but his grasp is weak, his fingers twitching where they brush against the material of the bodysuit.

「Cheung- Jin-」

Jin throws himself bodily into the pod, dripping ice-cold water all over the sticky layer of blood coating the bottom. The Kaidanovskys stop rowing, and Sasha scrambles to a sitting position, splint nearly slipping from her makeshift sling, to watch as Hu's breath stutters. Jin shushes Hu, voice hitching, good hand shaking where it cups his face, and Cheung scrambles to clear the soiled strip of plasticky fabric away from the wound. His hands come away covered in the clear, grayish liquid seeping from the curling, angry edges of the gash that runs almost all the way down his thigh.

"The infection," says Sasha, quietly, from the Kaidanovskys' pod.

"It's getting worse," Jin half-chokes, but Cheung cuts him off sharply with a look.

「Hu, it's going to be fine, you're doing good-」

Hu, to everyone's intense shock, lets out a tiny noise that betrays what pain he has been hiding the last few hours, and it sounds like all of the cries, all of the whimpers and hoarse sobs, packed into one half-smothered noise.

The noise rips Cheung apart from the inside, and everything, everything in him knots up and burns and twists and thunders through him until Hu bites his lip and shoves his head to the side, screaming through his teeth, 「Son of a fucking pig.」 He laughs, darkly, chest shaking a bit under the breastplate of his Jaeger suit, and then he chokes out, 「I dreamed we were being eaten alive by that damned Kaiju.」

Cheung swallows thickly. 「Hang on. We're very close to the shore now.」

「My entire leg,」 Hu spits out, still somehow laughing, high and rough, 「feels like it's going to explode.」

「Stop talking. Save your energy.」

Jin pats the side of his face, his face flashing through ten different emotions at once, as if he desperately wants to scream but ends up almost crying instead. 「If it does explode, you can get a nice new metal one with the Wei Dragon carved on the kneecap, so you imprint our seal on anyone you beat up.」

Hu's fingers slowly lose their strength altogether, and slip down Cheung's arm- Cheung grasps it and holds it tight, hating himself, hating the Kaiju, and hating everything.

The middle brother is already drifting back off, face paler than the Weis have ever seen it. He mutters darkly, shooting Jin a dirty look even as the lines of his face start to go fuzzy, 「My first target will be your ugly face.」

「We're identical, you idiot. You just called yourself ugly,」 says Cheung, before he can stop himself, and immediately feels rather foolish.

「I know」 says Hu, half-smiling. His eyes close, eyelashes fanning out over his still blood-sticky cheeks. 「All three of us. We're a mess, you know. But if this is the end, maybe it doesn't matter.」

And he falls completely still, breath low and raspy, head falling into the crook of his brother's lap.

The brothers stay like that for a moment, huddled together, with Hu's head cradled on Cheug's folded legs and Jin crouched over his head.

Cheung can feel eyes on the back of his neck, and when he turns he sees both Russians staring at the triplets. Sasha cocks her head to one side and says, more gently than he could have imagined her to be able, "Is he all right?"

"Sleeping again now," says Cheung, screwing his eyes shut and willing his heart to stop pounding from the shock.

"Your Drift hangovers last a very long time."

"… I'm sorry?"

"When… when Hu pressed his leg. All three of you jumped at the same time."

"It's not a neural hangover. We don't get neural hangovers," says Cheung, almost on reflex.

"You don't?" Sasha Kaidanovsky says, and this time she really does sound surprised. It's almost as if she put her guard down. Almost.

Cheung shakes his head. "No. The hangover is just like how we were before we Drifted. It's the same sort of… knowing."

They had been told by their commanding officer that sometimes, the pilots would cry in the aftermath of their first Drift. Some would yelp and scream and jerk away, or, in one memorable instance, throw a punch- but those were poor matches, she assured them, watching them step into their brand-new, gleaming red Jaeger suits. The good matches, the truly compatible ones, would sometimes cry, or immediately fall in love, or fall asleep from the unexpected strain in each other's arms, right there in the hanger.

She seemed somewhat taken aback by their complete nonchalance as they time out of the world's first successful three-way Neural Handshake, but shook each of them on the hand before dismissing them for the rest of the morning.

They did cry a little bit in the privacy of the Conn-Pod, but it was just a few tears of relief from the confirmation that nothing would change after all, and from the incredible comfort, and understanding, and love, that had just suddenly become almost tangible. They learned nothing new, and in the end, they truly could not say that Drifting was any different than when they'd curl up against each other in the dead of night, six years old and knowing that the other two were cold without exchanging a word. The triplets only raced each other to the cafeteria to grab a late breakfast, and to joke around, tossing a basketball between them, with only budding excitement and furious, boundless love in their chests.

Each privately thought, young and arrogant and more than a little bit prideful of their historic accomplishment, that perhaps other pilot configurations were a bit bullshit. How could any other relationship imaginable even compare to triplets?

Jin says, lowering one foot back into the water and visibly wincing at the freezing January cold, "It's not like we just psychically know what the other is thinking, but… it's complicated. Like, um, a feeling. Like the Drift, except we've had it since we were born. So in the end we were used to the feeling even before Crimson Typhoon."

Aleksis gently nudges Sasha's side with an impossibly thick finger, and she rests her head back to wink up at him, sticking her tongue out, "Okay. You win this one. Twin telepathy does exist."

"Triplet telepathy," Jin corrects, like they always have done. Usually, they wouldn't bother with arguing semantics- that's for the high-class, the expensively educated. But the Weis never refer to themselves as just twins.

That would seem like a betrayal.

There are three of them, after all.

Hu breathes shallowly for a while, twitching and pale as white asphalt, and then, for a moment that seems to stretch on like forever, burning a hole in Cheung's chest and making him scream, he stops breathing altogether.

 

5:20 AM

Sasha and Aleksis frantically row as close as they can get to the Wei's pod and when they bump together at the head Sasha jumps out, landing in the Wei's red pod neatly and yelling over Jin's high-pitched blubbering, "What happened?"

"Hu- For a moment, Hu didn't even breathe." Cheung says quickly, truly shaking in his skin. His mind is almost ripping apart at the seams, and he can smell only Hu's blood beneath the cloying sea air, can only touch his face desperately. "Don't know what it is. Blood loss, toxic shock. Cold."

_「This is your doing. This is your doing. This is your doing. This is your doing. His hands are cold as ice. This is your doing. This is your doing. This is your doing. This is your doing.」_

And suddenly, without any sort of warning at all, surprising everyone, Aleksis Kaidanovsky tosses his oar down, dives into the water, and roars at everyone in the Wei's pod, "Get out."

Sasha seems to understand immediately, even when the triplets can only scrabble with each other, too frantic to think straight. She tries tugging the both of them out and into Cherno's pod by the wrists, and when that doesn't work, she pushes Cheung, one-handed, into a standing position and bodily forces him out. Immediately, he tries to scrabble back up to club to Hu's side, but Sasha tosses Jin in beside him and blocks his path, hissing, teeth bared, "Aleksis will push Hu to shore. You two are tired, and will only be useless. He has not been swimming. He can get there fast enough."

Jin screams, 「Wait,」 and before he can help himself, Cheung spits out, wide-eyed, 「No.」He hadn't meant to say it, but the panic reaches up from his belly to wrap around his throat like a snake, using his body as a puppet, as a Jaeger. His hand shoots out of it's own accord and reaches over the gap between the pods to wrap around Hu's limp, cold fingers, through the watery red seeping between the plates there. He can barely feel himself move- it's almost like his brain is detached from his body, and he only watches as he shakes in his skin, feeling faintly like he's going to vomit.

Aleksis freezes, and then roughly growls, "You have to."

All Cheung can think is-

-the triplets are eight and they lie right on the ashy, cigarette-littered ground, covered in sweat and watermelon juice, basketball still rolling between Jin's feet-

-the Three Dragons are twenty-three and China is covered in their sigil, spray-painted on stop signs and shop windows, and kids ask for their autographs instead of running away from them like they're dangerous street punks-

-the Weis are sixteen and they prove everyone wrong by studying hard enough to get into the Jaeger program, without even one high school diploma between them-

-they are thirteen and Cheung and Hu make fun of Jin for kissing Guo's little sister Lan behind the knife store-

-they are twenty-six and Crimson Typhoon sinks beneath the water-

And even though it's completely illogical, almost insane, Cheung cannot move his fingers- he cannot move a bone in his body. He can only watch his hand cling to Hu's as if it is detached from his body, heart racing impossibly fast in his chest, flooding over with too much of every emotion.

The siblings have separated for entire nights before, sometimes even going for two or three days if that particular girlfriend of Jin's is the touchy type, but those times are few and far between. They have never been unwillingly parted from each other in a decade and a half. Once, when they were five, a doctor had tried to separate Cheung to look at his chicken pox in an adjacent room, and Hu and Jin had wailed and bitten the nurses until they were allowed in with him, and that was the very last time anyone had tried to keep them apart without their consent.

The Wei triplets were a package deal. It was always three or nothing. Jin rolls over and clasps his hand over Hu's, as the three of them, for one brief, almost calming moment, are three again. But Cheung can barely feel any warmth left in Hu's hand, and he knows, he knows that unless he lets go, they will only be two.

And the most irrational, stupid, childish part of Cheung simply cannot not let go of Hu's hand.

Sasha looks ready to smack him and hug him at the same time, yelling, "He will die, you stupid boy," but her voice seems muffled, distant. Cheung doesn't quite hear her. He only feels, vaguely, her nails digging into his shoulders, but when Jin slides his fingers over Cheung's and gently pries them off of Hu's, he seems to melt, somehow, bonelessly. Without any sort of feeling at all. Like he is the one who is rapidly dying, and not the second Dragon.

Hu does not wake, even from this incredible din. Cheung looks at him, looks at the missing wedge in his ear and the series of horrifying scratches in his Jaeger suit, and looking exactly as he has in sleep for twenty-six years, and manages to say, somehow, "Please, Aleksis. Please."

The Russian turns to his wife and simply says, tipping his head, "Sasha."

She nods, wordlessly, and then Aleksis Kaidanovsky is off and away, kicking up enormous amounts of water with every stroke, pushing the Weis' pod faster than any of the triplets could have managed. She watches her husband go, and her eyes rake down to his still-fresh wounds, dipping in and out of the water as he swims.

And Cheung was never the one to yell, never the one to make a sound-

-but when Jin remains completely catatonic, curled up in a ball in the Kaidanovskys' pod, Cheung stands up and screams his brother's name across the water.

Soon, the red pod is too far away to see clearly, and Cheung's legs collapse under him. Sasha Kaidanovsky is completely silent, and averts her gaze when Jin wordlessly scoots flush against Cheung, and curls himself tightly into his side.

This is almost normal.

What isn't normal is that after a long, quiet moment, Jin starts sobbing quietly into Cheung's shoulder.

In twenty-six years, Cheung can count the times he can remember himself crying on one hand. Hu cries whenever his passion, and his sensitivity, boils over and turns into unintelligible rage- when he is so upset that he can only express it with tears and not his words. But Jin, when the Weis were children, bony and wide-eyed and not yet the tall, proud figures painted in murals all the way across China, would cry whenever they came across a sick cat at the side of the road, or when a particularly likable character died in a film, or, once, when the pretty girl down the street called him a big-eared loser. Then he grew, and tears were embarrassing, but Jin would still cry- the first time the triplets went back to visit Shanghai, still in their Jaeger Academy uniforms, to pay their respects to their parents' grave, and when they failed to protect their old home and one of his old girlfriends was lost forever, or when the destructive yellow dog died in that American movie.

Tears from Jin are normal.

But these tears are not.

When Cheung reaches a hand up to wrap around the back of Jin's neck, he hears his brother swallow and say, in a voice frighteningly devoid of emotion, "Birth, marriage and death."

Cheung's hand stills before it rests on the nape of his brother's neck. "Together?"

"This isn't fair. We should be there, right there next to him. This isn't how it was supposed to be. But if he… Cheung, we are always three-"

And then, Sasha says, in an almost blasé manner, "Cherno Alpha did not have escape pods until this mission, if you'll remember."

This makes the remaining Weis pause.

Sasha Kaidanovsky, Cheung knows, is not usually a woman of so many words. She speaks with her eyes, and when that doesn't work, she switches to the dialect called Fists. She is, however, the Talker of Cherno Alpha, and when she makes up her mind to speak, she does so.

"The people in the Shatterdome, they think, 'Wow, the Kaidanovskys, they are tough. The wife and husband are the only pair that fell in love by drawing blood in the Kwoon during their first spar.' The story is true. He gave me bruised eye and bloody nose, I knocked out his molar. But really, love makes us cowards," she says, and she rests her head against one pale hand, leaning against the side of Aleksis's pod almost casually. Almost. "We thought, if there is no escape pod, maybe if the other dies in battle, I have an easy end. I can just die together with my love, without going through trouble of smuggling gun past suicide watch later."

She pauses, and then shrugs. "Well, pretty easy for us to smuggle gun, actually. But still, thinking of maybe dying together or not at all was almost comfort. But at the end, before we came to Hong Kong, my Big Dipper, he said, 'Little Dipper, maybe one day we win, maybe one day they find one hundred percent cure for radiation, and we might have little baby bears running around in world free of monsters.' And I said, 'Then we need escape pods, because baby bears sounds like good plan.' So we come, and bring warheads, on condition that they install these shitty little pods into Cherno. And here we are."

"I think" she says slowly, still managing to sound distant and incredibly understanding at the same time, "it is all right to choose to end your life with your family. I understand very well. Is maybe selfish, but we did not choose to be born. Maybe it is fair if we are allowed this power, because in the end we were not given much power except for what we take for ourselves. Maybe is our only way to have dignity as people, choosing our end instead of having life choose for us. But not for you."

Cheung cannot look at her, and she laughs, low in her throat. "You are three. Two, I think, is enough power to say 'Fuck you' to life, and keep living just to spite it. If maybe two were gone, the one left might join, to not be left behind. But two, two still work like team. Two still have power to fuck life in the ass. But is only my opinion."

Sometime in the middle of her little speech, Jin has stopped crying, but he doesn't move from his place at Cheung's side, and Cheung doesn't push him off. The warmth of him is what grounds keep, keeps him alert and sane.

"… Is baby bears still the plan?"

Sasha laughs. "World might end in a few days, so who knows? Maybe if we are still alive. And maybe after celebration drinking. And maybe after medical treatment for radiation, and for liver poisoning from celebration drinking. And maybe after finding new jobs, someplace comfortable. 'Piloted Jaeger and saved the world' looks good on resumes."

Jin sniffles. Voice still hitching, he softly adds, "Even if the world ends, let's have a celebration drink together."

"Yes. With Hu," Sasha agrees lightly, casting her eyes far away, chasing her husband's yellow-and-black head, swimming further and further away every second, until it is impossible to make out in the waves.

Belatedly, Cheung slowly realizes that perhaps the story was Sasha Kaidanovsky's way of comforting another person- to point out the stupidity of the worst-case scenario, rendering it into only a morbid joke, as if she expects much better of the sufferer. Perhaps this is how she shows her solidarity.

 

6:43 AM

The Weis are simply too tired to notice the helicopter until it is hovering right above their heads. A small swarm of medics lowers down into the pod and start to help them to their feet- Cheung manhandles Jin up first. Sasha nearly punches the first one that reaches out to her, and they let her clamber up after him, and Cheung comes last. The climb up is enormously difficult, because two of the rescued party have use of only one arm and the third has been swimming nonstop for nearly eight hours, but they manage it.

After all, they are still Jaeger pilots, though their Jaegers are gone.

Cheung shoves Jin in first, and then waits for Sasha's feet to disappear into the open side of the helicopter before clambering in himself. They immediately start back towards the Shatterdome, and Cheung sticks his head out of the side and watches as they draw further and further away from Crimson Typhoon's watery grave.

Jin grasps the arm of one of the rescue team members and screams again the roar of the whirring blades, "Our brother?"

The man only shrugs, face contorting into a guilty wince. He has a Crimson Typhoon pin on his lapel. The red enamel almost makes Cheung want to vomit.

He only stares out of the open side, still unable to process that he is being rescued. From up above, even in the murky, Kaiju Blue-stained waters of the South China Sea, he can see the wreckage of Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon, enormous behemoths like great dark shadows beneath the waves. He can see, out of the corner of his eye, Jin's broken wrist being hurriedly attended to, and he knows not to fuss- he will only slow their progress. He bats away the medic that tries to look into his eyes with an annoying little light, and only accepts the blanket to wrap around his shoulders when he is glared at menacingly.

The warmth it brings him is almost shocking in its unfamiliarity. 「Is this what warmth is like?」 Cheung thinks blandly to himself, fingers worrying around the edge. 「It burns.」

The wreckage, he notices almost disinterestedly, isn't so much in one place, but in a straight line through the middle of the West Lamma Channel. The currents wash away the Kaiju Blue, darker and more concentrated near Kowloon, and the very last remnants of Crimson Typhoon, pushing them, just as they had pushed the Wei's escape pod, out towards the China sea. Pockets of Jaeger parts, twisted and corroded away by acid, float flush against the shore, dotting the blue-stained beaches with bits of grey, and bright Dragon red.

「Like confetti,」 Cheung thinks. 「Crimson Typhoon felt like an unstoppable giant, and when we were in it we could face anything that dared threaten us. Typhoon felt like the largest thing in the world. It felt like home. And now it's confetti.」

He only notices the headphones being handed to him when Jin kicks his leg. He stares at them blankly for half a moment before he takes them and pulls them over his ears.

Immediately the headset crackles to life, silencing the deafening roar of the rotating blades, and a familiar voice buzzes in his ear, "Tango-Niner-Romeo, this is Peewee, calling from LOCCENT. I repeat, pass me over to one of the Weis, now-"

"Is Hu okay. That's all I need to know."

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph, brother, am I glad you're okay," says Tendo Choi, from the other end of the line, sounding more on-edge and harassed than Cheung has ever heard him before. Jin waves his hands and mouths, tapping his arm frantically, "Hu!" and Cheung nods, without even the energy to bat him off.

"Hu. Tell me, Choi, or I kill you-"

"He just went into Medical more than twenty minutes ago," Choi promises, and Cheung thinks he can hear murmuring on the other end, and restless typing on the control panels. "You Cheung or Jin?"

"Cheung," he replies, as all of the energy left in his veins begins to seep out, leaving him numb and boneless, cross-legged in the helicopter. He nods at Jin, knowing that his face betrays the news, and then Jin nearly sinks into his lap, both hands covering his face like he's still a child.

They're passing over West Lamma Channel now, and Cheung and Jin watch as they climb in altitude, bringing Kowloon into view beyond the jut of Victoria Park. Most of the area overlooking the harbor is completely demolished.

It looks just like the ruins of-

-Shanghai-

_「This is all your doing.」_

Cheung slowly releases his death grip on the side of the headset, mindlessly reaching out to brush his knuckles against Jin's unhurt hand. Jin doesn't look at him, but wordlessly links their fingers together in a poor parody of comfort, like they were all but ten years old again.

"I'm sorry we didn't come for you earlier," Choi says emphatically, radio crackling with every breathy word. "Gipsy and Striker sustained a lot more damage than we feared, and I… I just had to derail the helicopters to gather emergency supplies from Sydney in time for the scheduled assault on the Breach. We just didn't have time to spare, on the off chance that you didn't make it. When I got the call, I just barely managed to get one out of the scheduled delivery system to pick up Hu and Aleksis Kaidanovsky, so this one's a little late. My bad."

"… No," Cheung says into the mic, hands fisting into the blanket, wrapping it tighter around his shoulders and feeling his nails dig into the fabric. "No, we should thank you. I... apologize for threatening-"

"It's all good, man," says Tendo Choi, in his comfortable way, though he sounds like he's about to fall asleep in his chair. "Listen, keep the headset. I'll update you if there's word from Medical."

"All right. Gipsy and Striker are good for the last mission?"

"Yeah."

Jin leans his head into the crook of Cheung's shoulder, limply, shaking under his blanket as the medics wrap up his broken wrist, and Cheung squeezes his hand. "So we still have a chance."

"Seems so."

"I'm sorry Crimson Typhoon can't be there," says Cheung, watching the water rush beneath them. "We should have been there, in Kowloon."

"Turns out, Raleigh and Mako are pretty good together," Choi says softly, and Cheung hears his easy smile in his voice. "The Three-Armed Titan has saved the world enough. I'm sure it'll rest easy knowing that its pilots are safe, and in good hands. We'll fish it out as much of it as possible as soon as the war is over for good, and it'll rest with its buddy Cherno in Oblivion Bay for an eternity. Just what a hero deserves. How's that sound?"

Somehow, for some reason, Choi is an enormous comfort. Such a little thing, this promise of giving their beautiful red Jaeger a dignified funeral, and not leaving it to corrode away in a pool of Kaiju Blue, but in such desperate times, it means more to Cheung than he can say.

"Thank you… Tendo."

"It's nothing, brother."

Out of the corner of his eye, Cheung sees Sasha Kaidanovsky sink her teeth into the medical officer that has made the mistake of jostling her arm. When she draws back, her lips are red again, and she gives Cheung and Jin a bloody smile. "That man, he is good."

Cheung is not sure if she means Tendo Choi, or the medic she just bit.

 

9:08 AM

He registers no sound, no light or movement. Sasha Kaidaonvsky disappears, no doubt to find her husband, and everything is too bright, too loud, too hectic. Someone forces him to drink cup after cup of tea, but he tastes none of it. He only watches numbly as Jin's wrist is X-rayed and set into a cast, thinking of nothing but the burning emptiness inside of him, impossibly dark and deep and hurting like he is being eaten alive. They are discharged and nearly forced back to their room.

"There is nothing you can do but wait. Hovering will do no good. There is no concussion, so feel free to sleep."

Sleep? As if anyone could sleep at a time like this.

He showers, changes into his Typhoon reds, and waits until Jin is done before the two of them walk, side by side, back to Medical. Jin is clutching tight to Hu's jacket, emblazoned with their Dragon sigil, and they sit outside the wide double doors for what seems like an eternity.

Sometime, during the wait, Cheung hears it again.

_「This is your doing. He is your brother. You are the eldest. He was your charge. This is your doing, you worthless, stinking, stupid piece of trash that can't even speak proper Mandarin. You can't even pilot a Jaeger now. What use are you? You are a failure of a brother and an embarrassment to Wei Tang. You don't deserve the Dragon sigil. Mei knew you were trouble. Mother and Father are rolling in their graves. This is your doing. You know, don't you? That Hu will die, and you cannot stop Jin from following him right after, possibly with a stolen gun or maybe just a shard of broken glass. And you will die too, because you are three. Everything, together. You are a worthless piece of crap. Hu will die. This is your doing. This is your doing. This is-」_

「Shut up,」 Cheung screams, half-involuntarily, and half with every last scrap of fervor he has left in his body. 「Shut up. You are nothing. You will not talk to me in this way. Hu will live, and then, with his blessing, I will end you.」

Everyone in the hallway stares at him.

Cheung does not have the energy left to be embarrassed. He only leans into Jin's warm side, mindlessly touching the plaster cast, and hums when Jin murmurs into his ear, a ghost of a smile in his voice, 「Good for you, brother. Show that voice-bastard who is boss.」

 

1:15 PM

The doors open, and a nurse, looking like the most radiant, perfect, wonderful messenger of the Undersea King and Mountain God, looks down at Cheung and Jin and smiles, "He's asking for you. Well, more like threatening us with dismemberment unless we produce you immediately."

Cheung does not quite register running inside, but he feels Jin's fingers around his wrist, tugging him through endless metal corridors, and he sees Hu's face, exactly like his own, taped-up and scowling fiercely on a veritable mountain of pillows, and suddenly he feels his fingers start to come back to life.

Hu only makes a bland face at the two of them, still unnaturally pale and hooked up to a frightening amount of machines, but still gloriously, gloriously alive. 「So they say I have to be in here a week. Any chance of you two being able to sneak me out?」

Jin wails, childishly loudly, and nearly tosses himself right on top of Hu. Cheung only vaguely remembers to bow at the nurse before he shuts the door and crosses the short distance across the room before reaching out to grip Hu's good arm.

It feels warm, and solid. Cheung lets out a breath, and he carefully controls his voice. 「No chance, you stupid shit. You want to die of infection?」

「Don't care about infection. I'm hungry.」

「We'll get you a mountain of pork buns and cutlet and ice cream and pizza and egg custard,」 babbles Jin, wiping his snot on the bed sheet. 「And cantaloupes bigger than basketballs.」

Hu rolls his eyes. 「Those are your favorite foods.」

「We can share.」

「The Russians-」

Cheung shakes his head. 「They're here too.」

「Maybe off somewhere having a relief-fuck?」

「Shut up, Jin.」

Hu can't raise his arm to smack Jin across the back of his head, so Cheung does it for him, and the world begins to settle.

「Oh. Uh, is the world ending?」 Hu asks, almost as an afterthought. Cheung thinks back to Tendo Choi's voice when he spoke of Gipsy Danger's fight in Kowloon, and slowly shakes his head.

「Maybe not.」

 「Either way, we have a drinking date with the Kaidanovskys,」 says Jin sleepily, resting his head on the edge of Hu's bed. 「We're probably going to embarrass China. I mean, what was I thinking? They're Russian.」

Despite himself, Cheung falls asleep too, right there beside his two brothers. He had meant to stay awake, but once his hand finds Hu's again, and the sight of clean, white bandages and a proper cast on Jin's wrist properly registers in his brain, everything- the strain of being ripped from the Drift, the eight hours on the sea, and worry, the intense fear, the panic and the love, enough to burst his chest into a thousand pieces, crashes into his bones all at once, and he doesn't even notice his eyes closing, all on their own.

When he awakes, Hu and Jin are still asleep, but the doctor tells him that everything is perfectly fine, and that the worst of the danger has passed, and that Hu will definitely live a healthy life so long as he cuts back on salty foods and carbohydrates, and so long as the world doesn't end, of course.

With his one of his brothers' wrists in each hand and the brightest, sweetest emotions ringing through him, Cheung cries, hot tears and embarrassingly loud sobs muffled into the bedding.

 

January 11th, 2025  
8:39 AM

「This,」 Hu says with a toothy grin, 「is by far the stupidest thing you two have done.」

Jin rolls his eyes and briefly takes the ice off of his right ear to experimentally pinch the cartilage, and then immediately presses it back on. 「This is no different than the matching tattoos and the matching uniforms and everything else we match up like the losers that we are.」

「Everything we do, we do together,」 Cheung says firmly.

He holds the blade against the candle flame for a moment, watching the little yellow bud flicker and gleam, kissing the edge.

It looks good, he thinks, for killing.

The voice, now nothing more than high, panicked screech, jumps around in Cheung's chest, and with every last drop of strength in his body, Cheung forces it into the cartilage in his right ear. He imagines that it is a worm, a tiny worm instead of the snake he always imagined it to be, and he sees it try to crawl away, struggling and gasping and wriggling crazily. He doesn't let it escape.

He carefully pinches his cold-numb ear between his fingers, and raises the knife out of the fire.

With two quick flicks, he slices through the cartilage, carefully extracting a thin wedge from the shell and hissing in pain when the little piece of flesh falls away, leaving his fingers red and sticky. Immediately Hu hands him a clean, damp rag wrapped around another cube of ice, and Cheung presses it to the right side of his head, feeling a thin drop (water? blood?) slowly run down his neck.

「That… looks like it hurts,」 says Jin with a laugh. 「Gimme the knife.」

Jin howls when he cuts away his own extraneous slice of ear, but the howl is mostly adrenaline and wild, doglike cackling than pain.

Cheung and Jin check their ears in the mirror after staunching the blood for a few minutes. Two cuts are still red and slightly swollen, but the missing wedges are more or less superficially identical to the missing notch in Hu's ear, and Cheung lets out a sigh he hadn't known he'd been holding in.

He hears nothing but the sound of the air coursing through his lungs, a blissful silence.

Peace.

He turns away and makes sure Hu is tucked securely into the stolen wheelchair, legs folded under a blanket and face obscured with a pair of sunglasses.

「Ready?」

「Brother, we were born ready.」

Jin sticks his head outside of the door, and then hisses, delightedly, 「Now!」

The three brothers run out of Medical, with Hu still attached to three different IV drips, and out into the sunshine. Six different medical officers give chase, but the brothers have a lifetime of experience with running.

Kowloon welcomes them like heroes. Word quickly gets out that the Three Dragons are back, and as they're patted on the back, Li-Na pushes through the crowd and tackles Jin to the ground and nearly knocks out his teeth, shrieking with bitten-off curses.

Cheung barely gets them away on time, and they pass by desolate, half-destroyed alleyways and duck under crumbling passes and through wet, Blue-stained streets until they find what looks to be the last intact bar on the peninsula. Zhang-Jie rushes out to seize Hu's face in his hands and kiss him soundly in front of everybody, to wild cheers, and the four of them bustle inside to greet the Kaidanovskys.

As soon as they see them, Sasha gives a wolf-toothed laugh. "Your ears! Now, once Hu can walk, it will be impossible to tell you apart again."

Jin sticks his tongue out at her. "That was the whole idea."

Aleksis looks Hu up and down, nods once, and grunts.

Hu beams up at him from the wheelchair and says, "Thank you. I heard about your back. You might have saved my life, and I- we- owe you everything."

Aleksis grunts again. Cheung supposes that it is his way of saying, "Is no problem," or perhaps, "You owe me," or maybe even, "Glad to help." It's probably all three, at once.

"What are you going to do if the world does not end tomorrow?" asks Sasha Kaidanovsky, resting her head on an arm and smiling, perfectly painted red lips showing a perfect row of gleaming white teeth. She looks less like she has been carved from a glacier in the near-warm light. Like this, Cheung thinks, taking a beer from Zhang-Jie and raising it to his lips, like this, she looks almost like a normal human being.

Like a friend, maybe.

Jin beams widely. "Back to what's left of Shanghai, maybe. I have a girlfriend there. Her name is Xiao-Ling. And maybe to America- I have a girlfriend there, too. Her name is Karen…"

Sasha snorts into her drink. "I feel sorry for all of them. This man here has been telling us so many stories about what a wonderful man Hu is, but here you are, juggling girls like it's circus trick. Cheung, can't you control your little brother?"

Cheung looks down, smiling for the first time in what seems like an eternity. "Just because I'm the oldest doesn't mean they listen to me at all, Sasha."

He knocks back his drink.

 

-

“We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see **in every person a universe** with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.”

-Elie Wiesel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't consider the novel to be canon, and I desperately want to believe that the reason why no one in LOCCENT reacted strongly to Crimson Typoon and Cherno Alpha's demise was because they knew the pilots had probably survived. 
> 
> In my head canon, the Wei's parents died very early in their childhood, perhaps ten or so. Unsatisfied with being welfare children, they dropped out of school when they were maybe 14 and made their own living on the streets, balancing being normal kids while also kind of being technically homeless two two years. No one in their gang thought they were smart enough to get into the Jaeger program, so they studied their asses off to make up for lost years of education, ditched the gang, and were accepted when they were 16. Initially they were aiming for the engineering division, but Pentecost saw their potential, being triplets, and the rest is history. (The little mentions to their previous (illegal) associations with the Kaidanovskys in Tendo's "fundraising" meetings will be further explored in an upcoming fic.)
> 
> In all, I'm sorry I made Cheung so overly serious, Hu a sarcastic little shit, and Jin such a dweeb, but I'm not sorry for wanting them still alive. If Pacific Rim was GdT's love letter to tokusatsu and anime, this fic was my love letter to everyone in the fandom who liked the background characters as much as I did. This community is wonderful, and I hope I managed to contribute something to it. Thank you for reading.


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